


Why We Fight

by nijireiki



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Gen, K-Day, PPDC
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-30
Updated: 2014-07-30
Packaged: 2018-03-08 04:54:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3196019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nijireiki/pseuds/nijireiki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I was there, you know... August 10th...</p><p>Pacific Rim POC Week 2014, day 3: <em>Hero Material</em>:</p><blockquote>
  <p>"Who or what inspires/motivates them throughout the day? Is it their family? Safety of others?"</p>
</blockquote>
            </blockquote>





	Why We Fight

**Author's Note:**

> Tendo Choi POV, pre-film from K-Day through Tendo's hiring with the PPDC. Lined up film timeline with _Year Zero_ as best as I was able!
> 
> Teen rating for language, description of Kaiju Blue poisoning, and nuclear fallout.
> 
>  
> 
> _reposted from[Tumblr](http://princessnijireiki.tumblr.com/post/93287596429/pacific-rim-poc-week-tendo-choi-hero-material); prev. titled "PACIFIC RIM POC WEEK: Tendo Choi ; Hero Material."_

First half of 2013 had been pretty uneventful. Tendo’d already been living straight for a minute— after getting out (possession charges hadn’t disqualified him from TWIC or getting a Z-Card), he’d started up an OS apprenticeship, working the ferries in the Bay. It was grunt work— he did a little bit of everything, swabbing, working as a wiper, swabbing, splicing, swabbing. Every so often, between mopping every-goddamn-thing, keeping watch, or standing at the helm. And it kept money in his pocket, and food on the table, more than dicking around on the computer did, or even what the repairs that kept his car running brought in— not as flashy as the one he’d had before, but with the best guts he could afford.

Moms was still down in LA in Perú Village, fretting like always, but that was Moms for you. Dad out of the picture, for good this time, God rest his soul, but there was still Yéye up here in Frisco. That was it, for family. At least Stateside. Tendo didn’t get to see either of them much, but, hey, there’d be time later. He was only just getting on his feet after all, only just getting his sea legs. There’d be time.

And then, suddenly, there wasn’t— there was a huge goddamn earthquake at oh-ass-thirty in the dark, the night before, or maybe that morning; rumors of weird shit going down offshore, but he still clocked in, like everybody else did. Omnipresent fog, like always, and the ferry as busy as ever, people going about their lives because that is what you do when you live on a fault line. The city doesn’t stop for natural disasters, right? What did he care? His apartment hadn’t fallen down, his car was still running. Tendo didn’t stop to watch the sunrise. He didn’t breathe deep the misty air, or smell the salt, or enjoy knowing there was nothing under his feet in the ocean but what was supposed to be there. It was just another day, just another shift to punch. He’d laughed at Ramirez having a pen explode in his shirt pocket, drank some of the blisteringly hot, burnt, stale dishwater they passed off as coffee on that tub to shake off yesterday’s sleeplessness.

When some devil straight out of a watery hell emerged, four arms, teeth, face like a blade, voice like something that wanted to shake the world apart with a word, and the Golden Gate Bridge snapping like rubberbands under its claws to drive the point home. It was here to destroy everything, and it was good at it.

That was a problem.

The radios were still going, then, staying up at least for a little while. And Tendo had read about stuff like this, where people felt like they weren’t really there when something big happened, like they were almost hearing someone else talk when they spoke, or the other stuff going on was static. But he didn’t feel like that at all. He was shaking in his stupid rubber shoes, but Tendo felt acutely in this moment, in this space, and meant it when he’d said, “We have to help them.”

Mackie’d been the Bosun, and hadn’t liked the idea, but there wasn’t anything else for him to say or do, just that Tendo had really said what none of them wanted to hear, and thought it before anyone else. Fast-ass Tendo. Clever Tendo. By the first doubling-back to the mainland from Angel Island, radios were down. Phones went down shortly after. It didn’t stop ‘em from working. Tendo and the others manned the ferry for— who knew how many hours, really? Until they’d heard planes overhead, and Tendo had turned, seen the people filling the boat, saw them holding onto their loved ones, or trying in vain to get a hold of people here or elsewhere. And then: _Grandpa_. His Yéye. It was nearing the end of day one, the monster was still out there, occasionally reappearing, emerging like a goddamn Titan from the waves, and Yéye would still be in the city. Tendo hadn’t even called him after the quake.

He left immediately. Tendo told Mackie not to wait, and presumably the man kept going until they ran out of fuel, and good on him; because maybe San Francisco didn’t stop for natural disasters, but the whole _world_ had stopped for this— this monster movie _invasion_. It took him the rest of the night to make it into Chinatown, on foot, between fleeing cars (probably including his own, stolen, of course, out of the lot near the docks, leaving Tendo with a useless key in his pocket), the DOD Jeeps, and the first tanks arriving on the scene. Tendo was grateful for the coffee he’d been putting away, keeping him going through the night. Day two, he found his grandfather’s apartment, both of them yelling at each other in a broken Cantonese-English-sometimes-Spanglish pidgin, getting louder and repeating themselves uselessly the more urgent the situation became.

Yéye needed help down the stairs. They stayed hidden in the lobby the bulk of the afternoon when they felt the large-artillery gunfire rattling around them, outside the building. By twilight, Tendo’d found a likely-looking ride to hot-wire, and the shooting had moved from the ground to the sky. The grotesque thing looming everywhere, no matter which direction you looked, filling the skyline and the horizon alike, was heading for the Bay Bridge. Whatever the airmen were firing at it, it could bleed— and did, profusely, impossible volumes of thick blue ropes dripping as wide and as high-pressured as the stream from a broken fire hydrant, or sprayed in the opposite direction of the bullets that hit it, coming down in a sludgy caustic mist— but their ammo’s calibre wasn’t high enough. The damn trespasser wouldn't die. It took another day and a half to make it back west, and there was no sign of the ferry returning, and Yéye’s face had begun to pit and discolor where he’d been blood-pocked, and he was shaking, and having trouble breathing. They waited.

Day four: other people were making their way to the shore, and other boats. Planes being cut down, and the beast still roaring in the too-near distance. Mackie. Word on the ferry’s CB— everybody take some goddamn iodine, and Tendo turned it down, said to give it to other people on the boat, but Yéye refused to swallow his, pressing the pills into Tendo’s hand insistently, and watching him, making sure Tendo drank them down with more coffee. Yéye’s voice was so faint, so croaky, but even then, heavy with unshed tears and concern. B-61s were on their way. The plan was to go as far west as it was possible to go, on this boat’s legs, and worry about coming back later, but Oakland was about to be toast.

Yéye stopped talking altogether that night. The first nuke was dropped. Then the second. The world rumbled, and the mushroom clouds and the fires started in its wake were visible even so far from the shore, even through closed eyes. And… it was still moving. Come dawn day five, there was new word— even bigger guns coming in, or _a_ bigger one, a B-fucking-83, and goodbye to Chinatown and all of North SF and Alameda and Berkeley were all gonzo once it hit. Evacuate if you can. If you can’t: pray. Make peace with your gods, do whatever else you have left that you can do, because whether the _pinche_ bomb works or it doesn’t, these are your last moments.

And in the smoke mixed with the mist, already blackening from fallout, Yéye was crouched near the grab bars of the boat, wrapped in a worn-out ferry blanket, and started trying to talk again. Tendo pulled him close and held him, trying not to disrupt the burns on the old man’s scalp, on his face, because the skin looked like it would fall off with a touch, trying to hold his shoulders still so that he wouldn’t start grimacing and coughing again. He wouldn’t live for another day of this. Tendo’d been watching him, to make sure he was still breathing, his grandfather worsening and wisening and deteriorating before his eyes, but they both knew these were Yéye’s last moments. “忍受—” Yéye managed it, but only with difficulty. “忍受.”

There had been mass burials in those days, bodies weighted and dropped in the sea, or wrapped in shrouds and burned, and the survivors had all stood together before scattering. So, in a way, Yéye’s funeral had been a grand occasion, really. Moms had wanted Tendo to come down south, but there was still work to be done. What would happen next? After going “home”? Fast-ass Tendo, two steps ahead, already thinking about rebuilding. And then containment. And new bridges. And transporting equipment, tools, food, fresh water to folks who’d been cut off. Learning the new Kaiju Emergency Alert System, training new first responders for conditions he was one of only a handful of people to survive from the beginning. Dusting off his Spanish, taking night classes in Cantonese, because those were the languages he had any passing knowledge of outside of English, and people needed translation in a crisis as much as anything else, maybe more. There was work to do, and he would do it. Because he could.

In early 2016, he hit his three-year mark, earning his Able Seaman Certification, just over a full year after the introduction of the newly-christened PPDC’s Jaeger Program. It had been all R&D at first, lots of advanced degrees and doctorates crunching numbers to build humanity’s next chance to save themselves, besides irradiating the entire planet and killing themselves off to be rid of the monsters emerging in increasing numbers, on more and more shores. And so… Tendo started saving up money. It had given him another idea, another two steps ahead, building for a future he knew he could help drag out from the present, as long as he could hold out for.

Yéye’s life insurance had helped his mother with the rent, so there wasn’t that to worry about much anymore, though Tendo tried to supplement her food budget as much as he could, with how expensive it was getting to stay near the Pacific; but he cut his expenses back further, living off cheap coffee and worse cigarettes, and shifting his auto-work and computer-repair focus away from maintaining what little he had left to his name ( _use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without_ — he’d heard that somewhere, once, and it had sounded like something his Ah Ma might have said before she passed, a lifetime ago, before the world became what it was now). It was time to… build something new.

So by the time 2016 came along— by the time Tendo was AB, had watchmanship and steering under his belt, and engine repair, and coding, some teaching, some management, enough written Chinese to figure out a computer manual (though it would take him a little longer to get it read all the way through), and enough spoken experience to smooth out the edges without even needing to slow down changing gears between three languages fluently— by the time over half a dozen Jaegers had rolled out, metal and bolts and wires Tendo knew the names for, and had helped transport himself— he knew where he was going. And he had the means to get there.

The future was waiting. This military-militia-civilian thing with a label and a badge and a half-crazy half-comic-book dream to save the world. Tendo’d been folded and forged, and walked through radioactive scorched-earth crucibles, and stood numbed in cold ocean water, hammered by whatever deities were left standing after holding his edge against the demons they still had the power left to conjure. He could endure. Moreover, he knew he _would_. Not for gratitude, not for closure, not for fame, not for anything except that it needed to be done. The world needed saving— and why not? Why not Tendo “Legalizer” Choi, why not that kid from Cali who everyone wrote off? He’d survived, hadn’t he? So— do something with it.

Tomorrow would still be there, come hell or high water. And Tendo would fight.

What _else_ could he do?


End file.
